“Retirement,” loss of friends and the true meaning of life

was Jan. 3, 2020

It’s been 2 ½ years since I retired, and that momentous milestone was one of the best things that ever happened to me.  I, of course,  am far from free to do what I want since I am the 24/7 primary caregiver for my mother who has advanced dementia and diabetes.  The freedom I do have is release from the responsibility of doing a job right and working for others.  My job was immensely rewarding and helped save my life basically after more than a year of depression and  unemployment.  But it’s over, the last 21 years of my working life, and I don’t miss it.  I’ve never looked back with the slightest regret about whether it was the right decision to retire.  I was 66.  It was time.

 

It took me less than six months to fully adapt to retirement.  The reason it took me that long was because, being single and having no family of my own, this final job, like some of the others before it, took on a role of immense significance.  Co-workers became like family, and the job itself merged with my identity, my sense of value and importance to myself and others.  I’m not going to make a judgement about this. It was not an entirely healthy situation, but neither was it that detrimental to my well being.  It was what it was.

 

I am eternally grateful that my final job/career was not the only one I’ve had.  Since my first job in the early 1970s, I’ve done a lot of different things.  I worked in the social services field at an organization that helped the developmentally disabled, becoming their director of public relations.   I was a newspaper reporter and editor.   I taught both middle school English and college level  journalism.  I then ended up in  a career that fortuitously combined all the skills of my previous jobs into one.  It was really quite amazing that I obtained that job because I got to be quite good at it, given all my previous work experiences.  It required a lot of people skills, and in newspaper work I dealt extensively with the public and, with practice, learned the finer skills of communicating and interviewing as well as finding and evaluating information, skills that were critical in my final career job..

 

The best thing about retirement is not having to get up every morning and go to work.  I’m a night owl, so I was always up late, even on work nights, so getting up at 7 in  the morning was never easy.  Now I stay up most of the night and get up around 11:30.  Mom  sleeps most pf the day and night if I let her, but I try to get her up for “brunch” about 1 pm.  After I get her up, I often don’t stop for the next three hours, there’s so much to do getting Mom ready for her day.  So, in one sense I’m only partially retired because I spend so many hours a day tending to her needs.  But I can only do all this now because I am retired.  My last day of work was May 31, 2017,  just in time because I could no longer work and take care of Mom.

 

Now on the final part of my journey in this life, I feel liberated.  Despite the severe stress of my other job of caregiving, I still manage to find time on the porch late at night to have quiet time to myself to think about life, the work I did,  and the many good people I’ve known in my various jobs and  careers.  There are several co-workers in particular I regret not keeping up with. We developed very strong bonds of friendship, but strong as those were, they rarely survived leaving a job..  Also, I was usually at a job only a few years, so it was hard to develop really lasting friendships, but I managed to find one or two co-workers at nearly every place I worked whose friendship and contact with could and should have continued after I left.  I worked with some co-workers in my final job for 15-20 years.  That’s a long time. One co-worker in particular was someone I worked with for nearly 20 years,  He has been a source of great disillusionment and disappointment.  Almost every month after I retired, I’d go back and visit him and two other co-workers.  I was glad I went,  but something always nagged  at me afterward.  My former co-worker kept saying we’d soon  get together for lunch or dinner,  and that way have more time to talk than during my brief and rather hurried visits to the office.  For two years  he said this, and I also, but nothing ever came of it.  Finally it dawned on me that maybe we weren’t such good friends after  all.   I misjudged him over many years because although we had many laughs and chats together, it was all rather superficial on balance.  So I haven’t gone back to see him since  this past summer.  I still think about this co-worker a lot because 20 years is a long time to know someone and to interact on a daily basis.  And I’m grateful we shared so many good moments over many years.  But sadly, that was it.  Out of sight, out of mind is the way I now can’t help but interpret this “work friendship.” It really hurts because we invested so much  in our time together as co-workers, or seemed to, anyway.

 

So with retirement from a job can come a very distinct, and in many ways jarring,  break with the past.  I guess you could say I’ve had too many unrealistic expectations of people.

 

So it’s time to move on, cherishing the good memories from past jobs,  but accepting, too, that everything changes.

 

As I mentioned before, I make a lot of porch time for myself.  That is where I do my deepest thinking.  A sturdy and dependable rocking chair helps this along.  Although I don’t ruminate as much as I used to, I still have this compulsion to think back on the worst of my job experiences and failures.  I wish I could just turn off that line of thinking completely, but so far I can’t.  Strangely enough, it seems almost necessary to do this as it forces me to confront and be aware of that person from my past who made such huge missteps, but who also is  a very incomplete and fallible human being.  I think since I made it to retirement, I’m a bit kinder on myself, but I have to ask whether this kind of negative reliving of the past, in some ways a form of post traumatic stress syndrome, is necessary and inevitable.  It seems strange putting it this way, yet something good must come of it.

 

Then, when I’m relaxed and rocking on the porch,  I’ll breathe in clean air that mostly seems fresh and invigorating this time of year and so close to the ocean.  I’ll dream of what it would be like to have a little retirement place in the mountains of North Carolina, spending increasing amounts of time on my photography, which is a lifetime passion and interest of mine, starting in childhood as a family chronicler and after college beginning in earnest during  my first and formative newspaper experiences.

 

I never seem to have nearly enough time to do all I want to accomplish, especially since so much of what would be free time is taken up with caregiving.  Sometimes I really resent this, yet I know it’s the way things are, and will have to be.  I will carry on with my responsibilities with love for the person who gave me life.  When I see the loving expressions on Mom’s face when I get her up each day, and before the torments of dementia begin assaulting her and me, things seem in place and in their right order.  I can do no less than what I’m doing, nor would I want to.

 

So for me I’ve only “retired” from a job.   In its place I embraced a new beginning, the final chapter of life, and a time to sort things out, try to make sense of the past, and develop a much deeper understanding  of God and the life of the spirit.  In those moments of being I can confront the unknown in ways I never could when I was younger, working or looking for work.  That life energy is now directed at more important things — the essential questions of life.